In his essay, the museum designer Miguel Arroyo examines the range of art created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He reaches the conclusion that the arrival of photography, film, and television led painters to abandon traditional representation, both literary and anecdotal. He believes that this led to the division of art into two great currents: abstract and figurative art. The writer performs an in-depth analysis of the artwork of the artist Gabriel Morera, paying special attention to the literary component expressed in his work. Arroyo holds him up as a leader of a new approach that merges Kinetic and figurative art.

This essay by the well-known curator and critic Miguel Arroyo (1920–2004) about the work of the Venezuelan artist born in Spain, Gabriel Morera (b. 1933), appears in the catalogue of the group exhibition Confrontación 68. Along with Morera, this show brought together a range of artists from various trends, such as Régulo Pérez, Nedo [Mion Ferrario], Manuel Mérida, and Domingo Álvarez. For the exhibition, a number of prominent art critics in Venezuela were invited to choose works by an artist of their choice, then write about that artist. Having chosen Morera, it was then up to Arroyo, the director of the Museo de Bellas Artes at the time, to write about the artist. The writer believes that in spite of being decidedly abstract, the artist’s style also reflects the tradition of literary and anecdotal painting. To explain his evident fascination for Morera’s work, the curator confesses his interest in the artist’s combination of two different trends: figurative and abstract art. By applying the principles of Kinetic art to this painting, the artist creates a new style based on the juxtaposition of visual and written images, which the author dubs “figurative Kinetic art,” in spite of the contradictions others may find in this term. Arroyo notes the importance of the works selected, since one of them, Mother always told me, was awarded the Armando Reverón Prize at the twenty-fourth Salón Oficial de Arte Venezolano (1968). The value of this text lies in its in-depth examination of the aesthetic and semantic meanings found in Morera’s artwork.